Solopreneur Success Path

In early September 2022, Tom Clairmont released episode 109 of Solopreneur Success Path, titled “Interview with Michael J. Penney, Business Development Consultant.” The show is about helping solopreneurs launch and grow their businesses. This conversation runs 33 minutes.

How the interview came about

Clairmont opens his notes by saying he came across Michael on his favorite platform, LinkedIn. He then introduces him in one line:

Michael J. Penney is a proven, battle tested leader.

Solopreneur Success Path episode notes

The notes go on to cover his eight years in the Marine Corps through two wars, his March 2016 TEDxRaleigh talk, “What’s Your IED: How to Add Value During Life’s Explosive Situations,” and his work as founder of 5Paragraph.com, helping small and medium-sized businesses improve their workforce efficiency through better leadership.

What the episode covered

Clairmont’s notes list three parts of the conversation:

• The transition: leaving the military and going back to school, which the notes place in Boston, and how mentors and a business development program helped with his pitch for a patent and his first product
• The concept: how he developed the idea of using the five-paragraph operations order for business, and how he made it work there
• The newer work: why he started his live streams and his book writing

The notes also mention that viewers could catch him doing multi-stream live readings of classic books. Those readings were part of his own channels from 2020 to 2023.

Why it mattered then

By 2022 most of his interviews were about 5 Paragraph as a business system. This one went back to the beginning, to the mentors and the first product that came before the plan. For a show about people building businesses on their own, that early stretch was the useful part.

Ten days later he returned to Veteran Nation, and that December he was on the cover of SHIFT Magazine.

His service record: eight-plus years in Marine Corps infantry and three combat tours: two to Ramadi, Iraq, with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines (2005-06 and 2007), and one to Kajaki and Sangin, Afghanistan, with 1st Battalion, 5th Marines in 2011, where he led a section of advisors. Between those tours he served at Quantico as a weapons instructor. He left the Corps as a Sergeant with an honorable discharge.

This post is part of the From the Archive series, which collects Michael’s past media appearances in one place. See the full media archive.